Unsupervised Cross-View Subspace Clustering via Adaptive Contrastive Learning

Abstract

Cross-view subspace clustering has become a popular unsupervised method for cross-view data analysis because it can extract both the consistent and complementary features of data for different views. Nonetheless, existing methods usually ignore the discriminative features due to a lack of label supervision, which limits its further improvement in clustering performance. To address this issue, we design a novel model that leverages the self-supervision information embedded in the data itself by combining contrastive learning and self-expression learning, i.e., unsupervised cross-view subspace clustering via adaptive contrastive learning (CVCL). Specifically, CVCL employs an encoder to learn a latent subspace from the cross-view data and convert it to a consistent subspace with a self-expression layer. In this way, contrastive learning helps to provide more discriminative features for the self-expression learning layer, and the self-expression learning layer in turn supervises contrastive learning. Besides, CVCL adaptively chooses positive and negative samples for contrastive learning to reduce the noisy impact of improper negative sample pairs. Ultimately, the decoder is designed for reconstruction tasks, operating on the output of the self-expressive layer, and strives to faithfully restore the original data as much as possible, ensuring that the encoded features are potentially effective. Extensive experiments conducted across multiple cross-view datasets showcase the exceptional performance and superiority of our model.